Talk:KThxBye/@comment-3575890-20180907230334
I know I haven’t been here in ages, but I just need to vent. Ever since his suicide last August, my life has been in shambles. Any preexisting conditions I had before have been exacerbated exorbitantly (IE: generalized anxiety, body dysmorphia) and new problems all together have manifested. The worst of it, besides the overall grief itself, is the trauma from finding his body. The image is burned inside my eyelids and is all I see when I close my eyes. I especially can't get the memory of how he felt to the touch out of my brain - like cold candle wax. It was so surreal in that moment and still makes me sick to my stomach to think about. Yet, I’ve had not a single nightmare of that day. I think my brain knows I could not handle reliving it and has put a block there. But he still appears in my dreams. Sometimes he’s still alive, but dying and I can’t save him. Other times he’s already dead and saying goodbye. It never helps knowing I never got to ACTUALLY say goodbye. For the weeks after his death, I cried none stop every minute of the day, and went through every emotion a person can feel, but after that - for a brief period of bliss - I felt zip. I was dead inside. It was a wonderful feeling to carry on with life without being constantly bogged down by emotion. Dare I say, in spite of the horrible circumstances, those were the best days I had since his death. I was drinking and living my life without a care. It felt like things were looking up, but they were actually getting so much worse without me realizing. After that brief period of release, grief started to manifest in other ways. Out of nowhere came an onset of the worst physical symptoms I’ve ever experienced. I was in constant physical pain and convinced I was dying. These months were some of the worst in my life. I was tested for STDs as per the instruction of my doctor, which triggered paranoia that he might have cheated at some point in our relationship and passed something on to me. All came back negative. And then I felt so guilty for thinking he might have cheated. Then I was afraid I was pregnant as I had not had my period in three months - also negative. My cycle had simply been delayed by the immense stress I was under. After that, generalized pain. It felt like my nerves were on fire. I developed excruciating back pain that I was certain was kidney related. At one point, I was at the ER three times in one week convinced there was something wrong with my kidneys. They did tests on me and plied me with antibiotics to treat some generalized infection they suspected I must have had until they could know for sure what my test results could reveal. They’d misdiagnose me with all sorts of things until my results would come back and prove them wrong. Everything I was tested for always came back NEGATIVE. I spent hours googling my symptoms convinced I had every terminal illness under the sun. I cried every day thinking that my days with my loved ones were numbered until finally it all came to a screeching halt. Just like that, about six months later, all the symptoms went away. I realized it had all been in my head this whole time and that what I actually had was grief-induced hypochondria. I have never in my life been a hypochondriac before this! They say grief comes in waves. Not for me. My grief is constant. It just continues to manifest in different horrible ways. Following his death, I didn’t eat anything for a month. My appetite was completely gone. It’s amazing what stress can do to your health and your mind. My brain had tricked me into thinking I was dying, and now it is again tricking me into thinking other horrible things. Lately, I am a constant nervous wreck about losing more people I love. I obsess over their health and safety and spend every hour of the day fearing they will leave me. Someone has a cold - oh no, it’s going to turn into pneumonia. Somebody hasn’t replied to my text in the last 30 minutes - oh no, something happened. Someone hasn’t come back from the store yet - oh no, there must have been an accident. Words cannot describe the hell that is living in this constant state of dread and fear and feeling completely powerless to control what happens next. I am absolutely PETRIFIED of something like this happening to someone else I love to the extent of obsession. I keep visualizing all of these horrible scenarios - especially ones where I find my loved ones in the same way that I found his body - until I get to the verge of having a panic attack. I myself have already thought about suicide multiple times this week alone just to make all these horrible thoughts STOP, but I know when push comes to shove I couldn’t do this to my loved ones; no matter how much I just want to disappear some days. I know all too well how much it hurts to lose someone you love to suicide and I won’t put my loved ones through this hell. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. But damn I just wish I could take a long vacation from life. Maybe just a month of nothing but dreamless sleep. This month, I have never felt more certifiably insane. I am in a state of constant paranoia regarding the safety of my loved ones. I can’t imagine how crazy I must look to them when someone so much as gets a cold and I‘m already whipping out the thermometer, continually feeling their forehead for a fever, doting on them, and fretting over something so small as if they’re made of glass. Last week, I was at a wedding with my now current boyfriend and he wanted to set off some fireworks with friends in a baseball field. I proceeded to panic like a lunatic fearing he would get hurt, so he didn’t do it, but god I felt like an idiot after. On top of the constant fear and anxiety, the guilt has caught up with me completely. I keep revisiting the night before that day and thinking about all I could have done differently. We had a big fight that night and he had tried to make up with me, but stubborn me needed time to cool off and told him I’d talk to him in the morning. I went to sleep and he went downstairs to end his life. How am I ever supposed to live with this guilt I feel? On top of guilt over failing to prevent his death, I also feel immensely guilty about finding love again. I’ve started dating my friend who had been our housemate before. We’ll call him B. Now, I just want to clarify that there was NEVER anything of a romantic nature between us before this. I was deeply in love with my boyfriend at the time and completely devoted to him. B and I were only good friends, but that all changed after. He had become my rock. This horrible experience had brought us much closer as he was the only one that could truly understand what I was going through. His step father had committed suicide when he was in high school, so he knew all too well what I was feeling. He also had also been there when I found Kelsey’s body, so he was directly involved. I felt he was the only one I could truly talk to in depth about this that would understand. And he DID understand. It was like he knew exactly how and what I was feeling. Now I’m the type of person that hates to cry in front of anyone, but he knew how to break down my walls and get me to open up. I felt obligated to put on a brave face in front of everyone, but around him, I could just let go. In this, he very quickly became a constant source of comfort. I eventually fell in love with him and it turned out he felt the same. It just happened. I don’t regret it, but I do regret the timing of it. I wish I had waited longer, but I’m in too deep now and this relationship with him has been the only good thing to come out of this horrible situation. This has been the only thing to reintroduce some happiness back into my life. Still I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy and I feel so much guilt for dating again because I'm afraid, if Kelsey can see me somehow, that he might think I am trying to replace him when he can NEVER be replaced. It doesn’t help that some of my mutual friends with Kelsey do not approve and find my relationship with B inappropriate. The thing is a part of me doesn’t care if it is because B is the only person who can make me feel better. I really do love him so much. I just wish I could feel this way about him without immense guilt about it. This relationship makes me feel so happy and so miserable all at once. I know I have the right to move on, but I still feel deeply ashamed for doing so as quickly as I have. And yet I know I haven’t actually moved on at all. I still cry almost every night before I go to sleep thinking about Kelsey. I can’t stop mulling over our fight from that night. Our last words spoken to each other hang in the air and haunt me every night that I lay in bed. All the terrible things I want to forget are so burned into my memory. B does all he can to help and has been amazingly patient through all this, but even he can’t protect me from my twisted mind anymore. Another thing that has changed is my perception of myself. I used to be so confident. Now I just hate what I see when I look in the mirror. Maybe I hate myself so much that it’s affected how I see myself in the mirror. I have begun to see and now obsess over physical defects that everyone tells me are not there. I used to feel attractive and confident about myself. I’m not by any means starving myself anymore. I am eating, but I’m not putting a lot of effort into eating well either. This sudden bout of body dysmorphia just came from out of nowhere and I don’t know how to stop obsessing over this sudden feeling of constant anxiety about my appearance. Maybe it’s just my brain’s way of coping in obsessing over something smaller than the real problem, because at least I can on some level control how I look. I think that’s the crux of all this anxiety I’m feeling: the complete and total feeling of having no control left in my life. I feel like I put off properly dealing with this for so long that now it’s built up inside of me and has consumed my existence. In these last couple of months, I have never felt worse. I miss Kelsey terribly, and I have SO MUCH GUILT over everything. Our relationship was far from healthy and stable. He had a host of problems that I knew about, but I never knew how bad it REALLY WAS! I feel like I have been mourning the loss of him for longer than he’s been gone if that makes any sense because in the year leading up to his death, I had witnessed the rapid deterioration of his mental health. Paranoia and delusions were the worst of it. He often thought the government was coming after him or somebody was out to get him or me. I am SO positive that marijuana was the trigger for all these problems. I am not against recreational use of marijuana, but I have seen first hand how it can affect certain people with a disposition to certain illnesses. I am not certain if Kelsey had any predisposition to some sort of mental disorder, but I am damn sure that his overuse of weed triggered the onset of his mental decline since it got so much worse after he’d smoke. His behaviour and mindset was very symptomatic of what I could only describe as schizophrenic-like tendencies, but I’m no expert. That’s only speculation on my part. All I have left is speculation. He never left a damn note. I wasn’t the only one to see these signs either. All our friends were concerned. I begged him to get help. He never believed there was a problem. He did lie to me about seeing a professional though just to get me off his back. I knew he wasn’t telling me the truth, but what could I do? I feel like such a failure for not fighting harder to get him the help he needed. It’s one of my greatest regrets I’ll ever have second to my inability to prevent him from doing this in the first place. God, had I only known what he was going to do, I would have chased after him and stayed up all night talking with him - anything to stop him from making the decision he made. I won’t lie to myself and say we were always happy. I know how dysfunctional and unhealthy our relationship had been a lot of the time, but god damn it I loved him so much. He had an explosive temper and I am not one to be yelled at and not retaliate in kind so our fights were often horrible screaming matches, but it always ended with us making up. It kills me so much that we didn’t make up one last time. My last memory with him is us fighting. I can NEVER change that. This horrible experience has unearthed one debilitating problem in my life after another. I just want to feel like me again but I can’t with Kelsey’s final words and the guilt that has consumed my existence constantly hovering over me. I wish I hadn’t compartmentalized my feelings for so damn long. Maybe then I would be on a road to recovery rather than falling down this bottomless downward spiral. My boyfriend told me this would happen if I kept it inside and he was right. I’m a wreck. An overbearingly protective, anxious, tense, ridiculously paranoid wreck. Every minute of the day I feel on the verge of having a constant breakdown, but I can’t for the life of me just do it. Just release all these feelings. Yes, there are moments when I cry, at times very hard, but I get no relief from it. I don’t know what to do. I’m at my wits end. The one year anniversary was on the 13th - aren’t I supposed to start getting better after that? Why do I feel worse than ever? I’m seriously beginning to contemplate suicide. Every day I walk down a bridge in my commute to work. Every morning, I think about throwing myself off it. I just can’t live with myself this much longer, but I also can’t leave this world knowing I would be hurting the people I love in the same way that Kelsey has hurt me. I don’t actually know if I want to die. I just want to do whatever it takes to let go of every last piece of this horrible pain that has come to define my existence. I feel like I’m coming out of my skin and losing my mind.